No Commitment (Capital Kingsmen #1) - Lisa Suzanne Page 0,66

stability. He gave me himself. He offered to write his name on the birth certificate. He offered to be her dad.” I shrug. “How could I say no to any of that when I felt so alone before he walked into my life?”

“Why would he do all that?” Tyler asks.

It’s a valid question, one I didn’t really consider at the time because what he was offering me was everything I thought I needed.

“He fell in love with me,” I say, glancing out the window, but there’s more to it than that.

I don’t think he had any sinister motives, but I do think it was convenient that he slid right into my job when I had to vacate it for maternity leave.

He’d come off a pretty rough break-up right before he met me. He was in a position where he was ready for an insta-family, and he ended up with one when we crashed into each other at work. He was just at a stage in his life where all he wanted was to be a husband and a father, and his ex was pretty awful when she made him think she could give him those things and then ripped them away when she cheated on him and got pregnant by another man.

He was cheated on and got pregnant by another man.

My chest tightens as I think about Ford in all this. None of this is fair, but he loses the most in all this. The end of our marriage was imminent regardless of whether Tyler was here tempting me because we were never right for each other. But that doesn’t change the fact that he married me even though I got pregnant by another man...and then he was cheated on. Again.

“And so I took him up on what he was offering me. I was convinced at the time that there wasn’t anybody else who could give me those things. The stable home. The presence of both parents. The life away from the spotlight. A normal life.”

“You never even gave me a chance,” Tyler mutters, and he’s right. I didn’t.

He deserved one. I know that now, and I might’ve known it back then, too, but I was desperate. Sometimes desperation leads us to the wrong choices even if they seem right.

“A baby was on the way, and you were on tour for two years. The baby was coming whether you were in the same country as me or not, and so I did what I thought I had to do to protect us both.”

He presses his lips together and glances out the window. “So where do we go from here?” he asks.

I lift a shoulder. “The ball is sort of in your court, I guess. You have rights if you’re interested in exercising them.”

“It’s not about what’s legal here, Dani,” he says softly. “It’s about a life that you’ve known about for over two years that I just learned about today. It’s about a tiny human who is half me. It’s about that little girl, and I’ve missed out on her entire life because of you. I don’t want to miss anything else.”

“I’m so, so sorry.”

“You can keep saying that, but it doesn’t give me that time back. Do you understand that?”

I nod as the shame of his words washes over me. “So where does this leave us?” I ask, motioning between him and me.

“To be honest, I don’t know.” He stands from his spot on the floor and starts pacing the room. “I feel like I just got you back even though you’re still married to somebody else. I feel like I’ll never be able to trust you again. I feel like you lied to me, and you’re lying to your husband, and you’re so buried under lies that you can’t even find your way to the truth anymore.”

He tugs at the ends of his hair with both hands, and when his hands drop, his hair remains sticking up. He walks over to the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook his backyard. “If you would’ve asked me this morning before I ran into you at Carne’s, I would’ve said I’d do anything to have you in my future.” He turns around to look at me, and all I can see is his silhouette against the brightness from the windows behind him. “But not like this. Not as a co-parent with a person I don’t ever see a way of trusting again. Not with someone who could so easily lie and manipulate to